10 things (461 hits)
Category: RomanceRating: 2 on 5 reviews (Rate this item) (V)
Submitted by <andy.barnard.at.us.army.mil> (View user info) at 2007-06-08 21:49:57 EDT
How Not To Write a Novel
Step 1. Get yourself a computer. Make it a laptop with a seventeen-inch screen, wireless internet, lots of memory, and a DVD burner, so that you'll be sufficiently distracted by your ability to download internet pornography and transfer it straight to DVD. If you're like me, you'll be so blown away by the prospect of endless free porn that you'll delete your word processing program to make more room for video files and the latest media programs. The long journey to a failed attempt at a novel has begun, and you'll need enough smut to make it through the steps that follow.
Step 2. Choose a subject that's been covered thoroughly by thousands of authors before yourself. I chose war, but feel free to go the coming-of-age or quirky romantic route. Maybe even a drug book-kids love a good drug book. Obsess constantly about avoiding cliche and coming up with an original concept, until your structure and method is so experimental that it's unreadable. Throw out your first draft, and every draft to follow. Work for a solid week on one exchange of dialogue that doesn't even fill a page, and then decide that you could've just said, "He was at lunch when it happened."
Step 3. Take frequent smoke breaks, I recommend Marlboro lights, unless of course you are underage, in which case I recommend marijuana.
Step 4. Try writing everything EXCEPT prose. Poetry is a great cop-out to writing a novel. Tell yourself you're going to release a collection of short stories, it'll make the undertaking seem less mammoth. Always, always refer to the publication of your work as a release, like you're just waiting for the right offer before you become the voice of your generation. Also, don't forget that you can do whatever the fuck you want with poetry. If your poetry is too experimental to be read, you're doing it correctly. Refer to E.E. Cummings for proof.
Step 5. Buy a DVD box-set of a long-running television show and watch every season front to back. Repeat as necessary until you have killed at least two months staring at other people's fake stories. I'm on season three of The Sopranos, and I fully recommend it. That Lorraine Bracco is still a fox. Other suggestions include The Simpsons, Smallville, and Seinfeld. Don't ask about Smallville, I don't know how that one sucked me in.
Step 6. Embrace bad ideas. Overthink plot twists. Develop a character that you plan on revealing as the figment of someone's imagination. Kill off your protaganist early and continue the story from the point of view of his ghost. Rip off One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Play with the thought of writing the whole damn thing in the second person, future tense. Fuck it, kill off everybody and end the whole book mid-sentence.
Step 7. In the course of writing your doomed novel, put yourself through a life-changing event. Kill a man, turn gay, break off an engagement, or obtain a nasty drug habit, anything that so drastically alters your perception that you have to start from scratch.
Step 8. Read all your old books again. Feel inferior and wonder why you never came up with Slaughterhouse 5. Briefly consider getting an education before you attempt a novel, and then read some Bukowski and ditch the school idea. Get so distracted by better writers than yourself that you forget that you're supposed to be not writing your own book.
Step 9. How's that porn collection coming?
Step 10. Write on scraps of paper randomly, have nightmares and forget them, come up with your best work while you're trying to sleep and forget them by morning. Change your eating habits, stay up for days at a time. Get rejected by the New Yorker, The Sun, and Rolling Stone. Write threatening letters. Myspace too much. Listen to the same song twice in a row, every song. Drink whiskey and write nonsense until you look up and the sun's rising. Start over and over and over again. Stare at your screen until you can't see your way out of the room to smoke another Marlboro light.
Congratulations, you have officially not written a novel. Pat yourself on the back, Failed Novelist, and welcome to the workforce.
User Reviews
Submitted by phuzzygish (user info) at 2007-11-29 09:14:27 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
Spot on, actually. It's only second post of yours I've read, but I'm interested to see why your rating is so low...
Submitted by shadow (user info) at 2007-06-15 13:13:37 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
oh god it's true.
I'm working on Failed Novel #3.
Never got into the porn bit though, substitute "uber" for "porn" and it works just fine.
Submitted by DudeThatsBOSH (user info) at 2007-06-09 09:23:50 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
hahaha
Submitted by Stagger_Lee (user info) at 2007-06-09 01:31:25 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by DasHeer (user info) at 2007-06-09 00:53:32 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
hahaha